Yellow tulips sit in a vase on the work surface of an open kitchen. On a stand in front of the curved periwinkle blue couch is a framed photograph of two movie legends from the Netherlands, the actress Katja Schuurman and Theo van Gogh, the film-maker and provocateur who was murdered by an Islamic extremist a year and a half ago.
The scene is the set of a new film, Interview, and if it has a touch of the Dutch, it’s an appropriate tribute given that this is an American remake of Van Gogh’s brilliant 2003 film of the same title, an intense, shifting set of mind games and eviscerating power-plays grounded in gender and generational difference.
The film is a two-hander about a beautiful young actress, Katya, played here by Sienna Miller, and Pierre, the journalist sent to follow her, played by Steve Buscemi, who also directs the film. Pierre attempts to undermine Katya’s beauty and career, while she chips away at his smug, illusory narrative about the time he spent in the 1990s covering the war in Bosnia.
In the original, Schuurman, who is an extra in the new film, played the flirtatious Katja and the stage actor Pierre Bokma the embittered Pierre. Van Gogh had always hoped to shoot a version in the United States, but he and the American producer Bruce Weiss were unable to secure financing.
Then Van Gogh was assassinated in November 2004, by the 27-year-old Mohammed Bouyeri, after Dutch TV had shown his controversial film Submission, about domestic abuse of Muslem women. Weiss and Van Gogh’s business partner, Gijs van de Westelaken, found private Dutch money to realise, posthumously at least, something of the man’s dream.
This is a low-budget (£800,000) production, at once a homage and Buscemi’s baby. When Pierre takes a sip of wine and yells, “Cut”, the three camermen who have been shooting simultaneously from different vantage points cease rolling. This is the first time since Trees Lounge ten years ago that Buscemi has directed himself in a leading role. The dual functions are demanding. “I wish Theo were alive and directing me,” he says with a shrug. “Anyway, I wanted to keep true to the spirit of the original, but I didn’t want to remake the same film.”
He revised the script, by David Schechtereven, even while shooting. To cut costs for Katya’s wall decorations, he borrowed paintings from artist friends in Santa Fe and used photographs taken by his wife, the avant-garde film-maker and choreographer Jo Andres.
The three cameras allow the actors to perform in real time. The director need not cover himself by reshooting the same thing again from different angles. Van Gogh had begun experimenting with this technique in 2000.
For Miller, it’s more like being on stage than on a movie set. “I struggle as an actor with the continuity side of things. You have to do a wide shot, a master, close-ups. You try to re-create what you did already. If you’ve got three cameras, you never have to worry. They’ve all got the same take. It gives you freedom.”
Why did Buscemi commit to the project? “I watched Theo’s Interview over and over. I thought I was watching a long-term relationship dissolve, even though they were just meeting for the first time.” He says that Theodor Holman, a close friend of Van Gogh who wrote the screenplay for the original Interview, came one evening to observe the New York shoot and told him, “It’s certainly weird hearing you arguing with my ex-wife.”
“I realised that a lot of the original’s dialogue came from his own experiences,” Buscemi says. “That’s when it all made sense to me.”
“Steve is a very different character from Theo,” observes Thomas Kist, the director of photography for both versions of the film. “Steve is shy in a way, silent. He’s not very big as a person on set. He’s very quiet and focused on what he wants to do. Theo was much more outspoken.”
Schuurman explains that Van Gogh and Hans Teeuwen, the comedian who is credited with the story, based the original on her image in the Netherlands. “I led a wild life, though maybe not as wild as the media made it out to be.” Miller, whose Katya speaks American English (“maybe Pennsylvanian — my dad is from there — but with a little Los Angeles lilt, because she is a star”), is no stranger to media attention herself, especially after her former boyfriend Jude Law had a fling with his children’s nanny.
“Katya enjoys being famous,” Miller says. “She walks into a restaurant at night with her sunglasses on. There’s a side to her that embraces this; it’s her public persona. I definitely play her like that, but I don’t personally feel that way. With actors there is media interest, but I just wish it wasn’t so to the degree I’ve been subjected to in the past. I reached the stage, especially in England, where things spiral out of control, in which I realised I’m fighting a losing battle and can’t win.”
Kist sees an essential difference between the two interpretations of Pierre by Bokma and Buscemi. “In the original Pierre is very sarcastic, intensely mean,” he says. “The character Steve plays is more pathetic.” “I brought my own personality into it,” says Buscemi, whose Long Island working-class roots have inflected all of the films he has directed, from Trees Lounge to Animal Factory to Lonesome Jim.
“I’m not as intense as Pierre. I just naturally lean toward humour. My background is my background, and I think I bring that into my character. Pierre is 48 years old. He walks into her loft and it’s like, ‘My God, I’m never going to have this’.”
The life and times of Theo van Gogh
Born July 23, 1957, in The Hague, a great grandnephew of Vincent van Gogh.
Received a Gouden Kalf (the Dutch equivalent of the Oscar) for his films Blind Date (1996) and In het belang van staat (1997).
Member of the Dutch republican society that advocated the abolition of the Dutch monarchy.
Rejected every form of organised religion and in particular attacked Islam.
His ten-minute film Submission, shown in August 2004, depicted four abused and partially naked Muslim women. The film sparked huge controversy and resulted in him being murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri in Amsterdam on November 2, 2004.
Bouyeri was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
